Der Sprachkurs

As you know I am learning German.  The course is an intensive course and uses an immersion method which means that the lessons and course book are all in German.  The only other languages spoken are those of the respective students to each other and to the teacher if he/she speaks that particular language and can be cajoled into conversing in it.  This may sound counter intuitive but when you think about it, it makes sense.  If I think about my friends baby daughter who is just learning to speak, she and her parents don't have a common point of reference to start from.  She can't ask her parents how to conjugate a particular verb or ask them to translate nouns, instead she is immersed in English as her parents through repetition and association begin to teach her our language.  The same principle applies to my German classes to some degree.  Sure I am taught German grammar in a prescriptive way but I am picking up other stuff without formal teaching.  Nobody taught the class what the German words were for page or chapter or home work but through association you can't help but pick it up.  The same applies to a lot of other words.

I am one of the very few in my circle of friends that hasn't learnt another language.  The majority know of what I now speak and it will be old hat for them but for the one remaining monoliguist I will now wax lyrically about the joys of another language.

Take the definite article.  In English there is only one and it is "the".  In Deutsch there are six.  "Der, die, das, des, dem, den"  How and when to use them is determined by some not so simple rules which involve sex of the noun and whether the sentence is nominative, accusative or dative.

The indefinite aritcle.   In English there are two and they are "a" & "an".  In Deutsch there are five.  "Ein, eine, einer, einem einen"  Once again how and when to use them is determined by some not so simple rules which involve sex of the noun and whether the sentence is nominative, accusative or dative.

Then there are the nouns. Nouns in German, like French and Italian, are either masculine, feminine or neutral.  Unfortunately there is not a European standard for nouns and what might be masculine in French is feminine in German. There are no rules to determine the sex of a noun despite what people may say.  The only hard and fast rule is found in the Alec Birbeck guide to noun determination.  Alec correctly states that if you put "chen" on the end of every noun (e.g. Stuhl becomes Stuhlchen) then everything becomes das.  Das Brotchen, das Computerchen etc.  You may sound like a demented three year old but at least you are grammatically correct.

The next anomaly with German is that you have to learn to speak like Yoda.

"Teach you German I will."

"Learn to conjugate verbs you will."

"Strong in grammatically correct sentence structure you will become."